Walt Disney long ago became a latter-day Pied Piper, whose power to lead the American boy and girl to lands of make-believe was without precedent in storytelling. A generation of children learned their fairy tales and exercised their imaginations through the cartoon sequences of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. They shook with fear at Snow White‘s evil stepmother and laughed at Dumbo dreaming of pink elephants. They followed Bambi deep into the woods, and - in recent true-life films - followed the western prairie dog to his underground home.
Next summer Disney will present his youthful followers with a wonderful, real-life playground, chock full of space ships, fairy castles, tropical islands and early-American nostalgia. It is the nine-million-dollar, l60-acre Disneyland, now rising on fields near Anaheim that only recently held groves of orange trees.
In 1952 Disney hired a Stanford Research Institute team headed by C. V. Wood, who later became general manager of Disneyland. The team studied population and climate figures for the nation and eventually picked the Orange County site. There, twenty miles by Santa Ana Freeway from Los Angeles and only six miles from the LA area’s 7,000,000 population center, Disney purchased land and in May 1954 began construction.
When completed next summer, Disneyland will attract about 5,000,000 visitors a year, half of them tourists. It will accommodate 60,000 customers a day, with parking space for 10,000 cars and restaurants that will serve 7,000 meals and snacks an hour.
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